Mediocre characters dull shine of ‘Island’

ISLAND OF FIRST LIGHT, by Norman G. Gautreau, MacAdam/Cage Publishing, San Francisco, 2004, hardcover, 289 pages, $23.

I, Father Jerome Dalou of the Company of Jesus, record these pages so it may be known what perfidies and treacheries the English antipapists have perpetrated on an entire people, namely the Faithful of Acadie … who are numbered among the most devout of God’s children.

A Jesuit priest’s journal, hidden for centuries on a small Maine island, is the heart and soul of Norman G. Gautreau’s second novel, “Island of First Light.” Father Jerome Dalou’s 17th century journal is the catalyst that drives the writer’s modern-day characters to confront their pasts and face the future.

Gautreau, whose first book, “Sea Room,” was published two years ago and won the Massachusetts Book Award, turned to his French-Canadian heritage for inspiration. As the United States and Canada prepared to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the French settlement on St. Croix, Gautreau was highlighting a clash of cultures that continues to simmer, at least in the novel, into the 21st century.

While Father Jerome’s fictional journal is intended to be a story within a story, the blunt honesty with which it is written and the brutal events it portrays overtake the main plot and drown the characters’ troubles in a trivial sea. Their worries appear inane compared to the desperate struggle for survival endured by the priest and his Acadian flock.

Gautreau uses Caitlin Gray, a stranger seeking to fulfill her college dream of writing poetry, to introduce readers to Alabaster Island and its inhabitants. Except for O’zalik Moseley, the Passamaquoddy woman

who discovered the priest’s diary, nearly all the residents are of English descent and have lived on Alabaster Island for centuries.

The story unfolds as Caitlin befriends retired fisherman Freddy Orcutt, who has never recovered from the loss of his son to the sea. It is through these two characters and O’zalik, all well developed and highly defined, that Gautreau introduces readers to his stereotypical islanders.

These secondary characters are shallow, ill-defined and badly written. Each time the author strays from his three major characters and the priest, his story loses its believability as well as its depth.

The tragic power of Father Jerome’s tale of desperation and death at the hands of barbarous men and a crueler environment contrasted with O’zalik’s modern quest for justice was a grand idea. In Gautreau’s fumbling fingers however, “Island of First Light” ultimately fails because of the author’s inability to give life and light to his supporting characters.